Download ENVS Newsletter Winter 2013

Environmental Studies Program
UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER
ENVS E-news
Welcome to our first
edition!
We are pleased to bring you the first edition
of Environmental Studies E-News, which
will land twice annually in your inbox with
updates on the Environmental Studies
Program. We’ll share with you features of
outstanding students, professors, and
alumni, highlights of current research, and
news from ENVS graduates. We hope that
you enjoy this inaugural edition, and that
you look forward to our future dispatches as
a way to stay informed about the program
and your fellow alumni.
Winter 2013
In this issue...
Message from the Director
ENVS undergraduate named
"Outstanding Student"
New SEEC building to house
Environmental Studies in 2015
Featured donor: Scott Shipman
ENVS partnership: Red Cross /
Red Crescent Climate Center
Classroom Notes: Dr. Jill Litt's
mock congressional hearing
Message from the Director
Winter greetings from sunny Boulder, and welcome to
the first edition of Environmental Studies E-News! As
we worked to produce this inaugural edition, we had the
pleasure of taking a step back and surveying the state of
the Environmental Studies Program. Truly, many
exciting things are afoot. In this edition, you will read
about recent ENVS undergraduate, Kristen
Nowakowski, who studied sustainable tourism in Costa Rica and received
the Outstanding Graduate Award from the College of Arts and Sciences.
You will learn about a brand new collaboration between ENVS and the
International Red Cross Climate Center, and you will be privy to an update
on ENVS’ new home. You’ll see how Professor Jill Litt engaged her
students in a mock senate hearing to testify about environmental risk
assessment. And check out the incredible success story of ENVS alumnus
Scott Shipman, now Associate General Counsel for Ebay and an expert on
consumer privacy protections.
As Director of the ENVS program, I am so proud of the energy and
enthusiasm that ENVS students have shown and continue to show in
support of this program and their deep commitment to current
environmental challenges. It is through the energetic efforts of our current
students, as well as you, their predecessors, that we have been able to
expand the number of faculty, support staff, course offerings, and visibility
of the program on this campus. As we continue to strive to improve our
programs, we ask for your feedback and support, so that we may make this
the best program that it can be. For the stronger ENVS becomes as a
program and CU is as an institution, the more valuable your degree
becomes over time.
Please watch your inbox for future editions, and let us know if you have
comments or questions by emailing me at [email protected].
Happy reading!
Sharon Collinge, Director
Environmental Studies Program
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ENVS undergraduate named "Outstanding
Student"
Each semester, the College of Arts and Sciences bestows upon one
undergraduate a very high honor: the Outstanding Student Award. Kristen
Nowakowski, a recent environmental studies graduate, received this award
for the graduating class of December 2012. Kristen graduated with a double
major in Environmental Studies (with honors) and Geography. Her
near-perfect GPA, three-year commitment to CU’s Environmental Center,
and the completion of an original undergraduate honors thesis contributed
to her being chosen for this prestigious award.
One would be hard-pressed to find a student as dedicated to environmental
issues as Kristen. While she wasn’t attending classes or studying, Kristen
spent spare time during her first year elbow deep at the campus recycling
center. She also worked two summers as a recycling collector at various
music festivals, and
interned with ESPN to help
execute the 2011 summer
X-games in an
environmentally friendly
manner. Kristen’s
willingness to get her
hands dirty for the
environment helped enable
her to conduct research in
Costa Rica for her
undergraduate honors
thesis, which entailed wading through streams to collect water quality data
in order to assess a hotel’s compliance with the country’s sustainability
standards. Her thesis, entitled “Gauging the Reliability of Costa Rica’s
Certificate for Sustainable Tourism,” was “path-breaking” according to
Steven Leigh, the Dean of Arts and Sciences. At Kristen’s graduation
ceremony in December, Leigh remarked that “We think the research has
very important results, not just because the hotel was probably not in
compliance, [but also because] the research offers a simple test for stream
quality that can be widely applied.” Additionally, Kristen possibly
discovered a new species of dragonfly (Gomphidea spp.)!
Kristen will start a new job at an environmental consulting firm in Denver
this month. Congratulations to Kristen on her academic accomplishments
and on her important research findings! She truly is an outstanding example
of how an undergraduate degree in environmental studies can be applied.
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New SEEC building to house Env. Studies in
2015
Question: What do you get when you put three research institutes, two
federal partners, two academic departments, and cutting-edge laboratory
equipment into a state-of-the-art workspace dedicated to interdisciplinary
research?
Answer: Mutual inspiration and beneficial exchanges – what Nobel
Laureate and CU professor Tom Cech terms as “fruitful collisions” of
people, research, and ideas.
That’s how Environmental Studies Professor James White and many others
are envisioning the new Sustainability, Energy, and Environment Complex
(“SEEC”), which he hopes will be ready to house Environmental Studies
and many other programs in 2015. “This will not be a building for an
individual discipline, as has traditionally been the case at CU," said White.
"What we want to do is to create academic 'neighborhoods' all under one
roof to allow for maximum mingling and interdisciplinary interactions.
White is the Director of the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research
(INSTAAR) at CU, one of the many groups that will occupy the new SEEC
space. The complex will house two academic units - Environmental Studies
and Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences - as well as several institutes,
including the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI), the
Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), and
the Center of the American West. Additionally, two federal groups will
have space in SEEC: the U.S. Geological Survey and the National
Renewable Energy Laboratory.
SEEC will consist of two buildings at the corner of Colorado Avenue and
Foothills Parkway. One of the buildings has been purchased already and
was the old office of US West. This building will provide 289,000 square
feet of office and will be retrofitted as offices and workspace (including an
accelerator mass spectrometer) for SEEC tenants. The second building will
be built from the ground up and will provide state of the art laboratory
space. The 145,000 LEED-certified lab building will be constructed using
an open lab design concept to encourage idea exchange and collaboration.
"The groups that will be housed at the SEEC campus currently are spread
across seventeen buildings at CU," said White. "SEEC is thus not only a
new building, but a new approach to academic research. Instead of
separating disciplines with brick walls and institutional boundaries, our
hope is to encourage coordination and innovation between research
endeavors that have traditionally been disparate."
SEEC will provide the true home Environmental Studies has never had.
ENVS began as a program at CU in 1993 and was first housed in the attic
of Hellems. It was then moved to Ketchum, then to Benson, and currently is
housed in the Arts and Sciences Office Building 1 at 1201 17th Street.
White reports that $15 million is still needed for construction. He is
launching a major donation campaign to help meet these costs, soliciting
alumni donations as well as donations from private partners. His group is
working with a local architect and contractor to move forward with design
of the new lab as well as the building retrofit.
"Our vision for SEEC is to help guide the world towards sustainability in an
elegant and innovative fashion," said White.
Click here to donate to the SEEC building fund.
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Featured Donor: Scott Shipman
Scott Shipman has always had a thirst for understanding the rules that
govern how things work - whether ecological processes, human bodies, or
the global economy. This innate curiosity led him as an undergraduate away
from a business major and towards an environmental studies degree. "The
major allowed me to pick a multitude of upper-level sciences and to design
my own course of study, which I thought was fascinating. I was looking for
a degree that would enable me to learn how the world really works - how
things move, how things are created, and how things change. What could be
more fascinating than that?"
Shipman graduated from CU in
1994 and pursued a two-year career
as a self-proclaimed ski bum in
Aspen, Colorado. During that time,
he applied for law school and was
accepted into several programs,
choosing Santa Clara University
over others (including CU Boulder).
Shipman grew up within ten miles
of the infamous Love Canal toxic
waste travesty, and as a new law
student, environmental law was on
his short list of interests. Santa
Clara Law had an environmental
program and was relatively close to
Silicon Valley, which at the time
was undergoing significant transformation "from orchards to chip
manufacturing," with resulting superfund and other problems requiring new
litigation and policy. However, after his first year, Shipman was offered an
internship abroad in privacy law, then an internship with Ebay after his
second year. He was deeply hooked by privacy law, and he has been
engaged in this subject ever since. Shipman has now worked at Ebay for
fifteen years, serving as the company's Chief Privacy Officer. In addition,
he teaches privacy law at Santa Clara.
Shipman describes how exciting it was to work in privacy law at its dawn in
history: "My field didn't exist when I joined Ebay - literally, companies
were just launching websites and the need for privacy law was a completely
new concept. I got to be on the cutting edge of making new rules, and that
was utterly fascinating."
To Shipman, retrospectively the progression from an environmental studies
undergraduate degree to a law degree makes complete sense. "I've always
wanted to learn how things worked, and my undergraduate major provided
that opportunity. Law fulfilled this same part of me; it's just the subject
that's different. Law studies the rules of the game that we humans have
imposed upon ourselves."
The idea of attending law school was first planted by one of Shipman's
graduate instructors during a five-week-long Arctic ecology field trip he
participated in as an undergrad. Said Shipman, "he told me I had a very
analytical mind and asked if I'd ever considered law school. The rest is
history."
Shipman has chosen to remain connected to and supportive of CU partly for
the affection he still feels for the university, and partly because he believes
it is a worthwhile cause. "The decision to give back to an alma mater is a
personal choice any alumni faces. I gravitate towards causes that
metaphorically teach people to bake bread rather than simply giving out a
loaf. I see a great opportunity for this within CU's environmental studies
program, especially because of its location - being so close to some very
special parts of the world and areas of ecological significance, students can
engage in environmental learning in ways that don't exist at other
universities."
Aside from annual giving, Shipman remains connected to CU in other
ways. He recently presented at the Silicon Flatirons Conference, hosted by
CU's Wolf Law School earlier this year. "Wolf Law is now moving into
tech, which is interesting - I moved away from CU, and now CU is coming
back to me. Boulder will always be a special place for me, so I welcome
any opportunity to visit and stay connected."
Shipman's advice for current ENVS students? "It's not about what you're
learning, but it's about learning how to learn. Remember that the grade is
just feedback on how well you're doing that. Truly, the mastery of the
subject isn't the point - the point is your awareness of your progression and
your learning."
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New graduate internship program with Red
Cross / Red Crescent Climate Center
Environmental Studies is pleased to announce a new partnership between
the University of Colorado at Boulder (UCB) and the Red Cross/Red
Crescent Climate Centre (RCRC CC). Among the many benefits of this
new collaboration is the launch of a new graduate internship program,
which will send Environmental Studies masters and PhD students to East
and South Africa for three months during the summers of 2013 and 2014.
The first round of interns will be selected this spring.
Climate change is widely agreed to be one of the most concerning
humanitarian challenges of the coming century. However, as climate
science and research on possible adaptation and mitigation measures are
produced at a rapid rate,
there remains a significant
gap in the ability of
decision-makers to translate
science into policy that
reduces disaster risk and
enhances disaster relief.
This is partly due to lack of
technical expertise, since
navigating amongst the
wide array of available
knowledge related to
extreme weather and climate change can be overwhelming and inaccessible.
Enter: the RCRC CC graduate internship program. This partnership with
RCRC CC aims to help close the science-policy gap and increase climate
science communication by integrating access to cutting-edge research on
climate change adaptation and field-placement of UCB graduate students
into RC regional field offices in Africa and Central/South America.
The two central themes of this internship program are improving climate
change communication and adaptation decision-making within the
humanitarian sector in response to current and future climate variability.
Environmental Studies graduate interns will tailor their experience so that it
contributes to their graduate research, contributing in some way to the body
of humanitarian decision-making knowledge. Possible graduate student
projects may encompass topics such as how scientific information is used in
decision-making, the communication of uncertainty, perceptions of risk, and
methods for characterizing vulnerability and adaptive capacity. The
internship program envisions the graduate students as critical conduits to
connect academic research
on climate science
communication and
adaptation with Red Cross
staff who are working to
establish more effective
methods for preparing for
and responding to climate
change and extreme
weather events. In this
way, a mutually beneficial
opportunity is created:
graduate students will gain
valuable experience and substantive data for their research, Environmental
Studies faculty will be able to expand the scope of their own research, and
the Red Cross Climate Center staff will gain expanded access to
information and tools to support their work in preparedness and adaptation.
The program is expected to have wide-reaching impacts. The RC Climate
Centre coordinates information on climate change for the International
Federation of Red Cross/Red Crescent (IFRC) Societies, which is the
largest humanitarian organization in the world with a network of 187
National Societies and over 13 million volunteers. The RC Climate Centre
provides access to information and resources to improve understanding of
the humanitarian consequences of climate change and extreme weather
events. In this way, countless individuals around the world could benefit
from this project.
The project is led by two ENVS faculty members, Max Boykoff and Lisa
Dilling, as well as ENVS PhD student Meaghan Daly, who worked
professionally with the RC Climate Center.
Said Boykoff, "We're pleased to have this opportunity to collaborate with
the Red Cross Climate Centre. This endeavor will benefit students greatly
by providing these avenues for field work along these themes, and the Red
Cross Climate Centre will benefit through students' fresh perspectives,
critical insights and productive contributions."
The RCRC internship program was made possible through the generous
donation of CU graduate Christopher
Meloni and his wife, Sherman Williams.
Alumni donations such as this create
opportunities that are invaluable to
environmental studies graduate and
undergraduate students, who will be the environmental decision makers of
tomorrow. To support this and other important programs through CU
Environmental Studies, please visit our donation page.
To learn more about the Environmental Studies graduate internship program
through Red Cross/Red Crescent, please
visit: sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/students/redcross/about.html.
Additionally, you may find information about the Red Cross/Red Crescent
Climate Center here: http://www.climatecentre.org/site/about-us
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Classroom Notes: Dr. Litt's mock congressional
hearing on environmental health policy
Article by Dr. Jill Litt, Assistant Professor, Environmental Studies
Over the past several months, I have had the pleasure of working with 25
undergraduate ENVS majors through an upper level capstone course
entitled ‘Environmental Risk and Public Health.’ The aim of this course
was to understand the tenets of risk assessment methodologies and to use
these methods to evaluate contemporary hazards in our everyday
environments. These hazards they chose to examine varied and included
methyl mercury in fish, chromium and arsenic in drinking water, pesticide
residues, and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), also known as
flame-retardants. As part of this course, students selected a chemical such
as methyl mercury, created a scenario for exposure and then sorted through
toxicological and epidemiologic data, exposure data and risk information to
contemplate these hazards and estimate whether they were harmful or not,
given the conditions specified in their scenarios.
For example, one of the students in this course chose to evaluate exposure
to glyphosate (a chemical in herbicides) in his hometown in Southern
California. He proposed a scenario that involved children attending a
childcare center downwind from a sprawling orchard. This student was
interested in understanding potential exposures from inhalation and
ingestion of dusts contaminated with glyphosate. By using scenarios such
as this, students learned to identify environmental health hazards, assess
exposures, and calculate potential risks. Through this process they became
familiar with a range of data sources from the National Library of Medicine
and from published epidemiologic and animal literature, then used this
information to generate knowledge about a range of chemicals and the
uncertainties associated with these studies.
I then asked these budding risk scientists to turn their attention to a
contemporary risk situation – the waste generated from coal-burning power
plants. This coal combustion material, also known as “fly ash,” does not get
a lot of attention because it is stored in large containment areas in remote
areas of the United States. However, the amount of these aging containment
areas across the United States is prolific (hundreds), and they contain low
concentrations of toxic substances including arsenic, chromium, lead, and
mercury. In December 2008, the nation awakened to the startling news of
one such aging containment area failing, in which 5.4 million cubic yards of
coal fly ash overflowed a retention pond, wreaking havoc on the nearby
community of Harriman, Tennessee and the surrounding environment.
Suddenly, the regulatory spotlight shifted to the US Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) to understand how something like this could have
happened.
The public soon learned that fly ash is pervasive, abundant, toxic, and lacks
a comprehensive regulatory framework to guide its management. It also
learned that with adequate protections in place, some of the stress on fly ash
storage facilities could be alleviated if there were incentives in place to
recover fly ash and reuse it in the production of concrete, structural fill, soil
amendments and feedlot applications. The public also learned that until
regulatory clarity is achieved, fly ash might not realize its potential for
reuse. The EPA is now in the midst of a rulemaking on coal ash, due to the
regulatory uncertainty of fly ash and mounting concerns following another
industrial disaster – the Kingston Fossil Plant Spill of 2008.
Given the timeliness of this issue, our ENVS students set out to investigate
the hazards of fly ash and evaluate the regulatory options currently on the
table: 1) to regulate coal ash as a hazardous waste, or 2) to manage it as a
solid waste and thus deem the waste non-hazardous. To develop positions
on this issue, students formed five groups representing various perspectives
–Xcel Energy, the Sierra Club, Earth Justice, the US Geological Survey, and
Recycling First. They conducted interviews with leaders from these various
organizations to understand the full range of challenges associated with the
various regulatory options now being contemplated. Students then prepared
testimonies communicating their positions on these issues.
During the second to last week of
class, these ‘witnesses’ were called
to testify in a mock Senate hearing.
Tom Yulsman (Associate Professor of Journalism and faculty member in
ENVS), Ms. Gail Frankfort (a senior auditor in the class), and I served as
the Senate panel. Dressed in suits and ties, the students filed in, armed with
persuasive visuals and graphs and thorough written testimonies. Over the
course of three days, the students shared their views and challenged their
peers on the merits of their respective arguments. Although the students
were skeptical about this project and the utility of this congressional
hearing, they left with tremendous sense of satisfaction and optimism about
how they might be able to influence policy, how they could use their
training in Environmental Studies, and how they need to learn about and
listen to all sides of an issue. Through post-hearing discussions and our
class debrief, the students overwhelmingly agreed that the regulatory path
to managing fly ash must consider and weigh heavily options that support
re-use. The students felt that a policy position against recycling of fly ash is
a policy position against the environment.
This type of capstone experience in ENVS in invaluable. The growth I
observed over the course of the semester was tremendous and represented
development not only in a core knowledge area – the risk sciences – but
also reflected a cohesion among the students as they worked together in a
respectful and productive way. It also tapped into communication and
critical thinking skills as students were forced to contemplate a vexing
environmental policy issue. This experience also exposed the talents of our
students as they got to exercise a range of skills that had been relatively
dormant over the course of their first three years at CU. I am grateful for
our community of partners from Xcel, local non-governmental
organizations such as Clean Energy Action, Recycling First, the US
Geological Survey for working with our students, lending their time and
perspectives and helping our students to reach outside of the walls of the
CU Boulder campus to contemplate contemporary environmental and
public health problems.
Dr. Litt is Associate Professor at Colorado School of
Public Health and Assistant Professor of Environmental
Studies at CU Boulder
Environmental Studies Program | University of Colorado Boulder
303-492-7510 | [email protected] | http://envs.colorado.edu
Arts and Sciences Office Building 1, 1201 17th St, Boulder, CO 80309
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